“Look out!” I shriek as Thane comes forward, swiping at Natalie with his bloodied blade. She springs away, dodging his blow. With Thane distracted, I roll off the stone slab and land hard on the floor. I try prying my wrists from the restraints, but the tape bunches and pulls painfully against my skin.

Thane and Natalie are locked in a knife fight. While Natalie fights like a dancer, her thrusts graceful and deliberate, Thane is full of rage, slicing and cleaving, backing her into a corner. At the last second, she shifts into her raven form and takes flight overhead, but Thane is quick and grabs her claw, jerking her from the air and slamming her into the wall. She reverts to her hybrid form, a heap of feathers on the floor.

“No!” I scream, and Thane advances on me. I bite at the tape around my wrists to loosen it. He lifts the blade over his head with both hands, and as it comes down, my hands are free and the thread comes to life in my palm. It lances him, piercing his chest. His eyes and mouth go wide as the thread passes through his throat and pops out one eye, then the other.

When he’s consumed, Thane’s body falls, lifeless, to the floor, and the coin lands on my chest with a thud, but I barely register the feeling, because a dark cloud stands in the place where Thane was. It is powerful and crackles with the energy of the dead. Influence hisses at me, and I swear to Charon it rears back as if to punch me and charges forward. The sensation of it inside me is something I don’t quite have words for. It’s like the sensation of falling when you’re upright and haven’t even moved. It’s the sensation that someone’s in the room with you but you’re alone.

It’s searching for something to latch on to—a dark seed it can fertilize and grow into something all-consuming and terrible.

It finds what it’s looking for in the form of my poppa’s death. The day I found him dead after he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. It’s a day I’ve never forgotten but one I don’t bring to the surface often, yet Influence pulls it out of the dark pool of my mind, sets it high upon a pedestal, and tells me to worship it.

I scream.

My brain feels divided in two: one side rational, the other desperate for death. Tears rush down my face, and I feel split into a thousand jagged pieces. I’ll never be put back together again. Too much of myself has been lost. With this new sadness comes a power I’ve never felt, a pump of adrenaline, motivated by a wish to kill myself.

I cannot continue.

I have to end the pain and suffering…